JANA

The exhibition takes as its point of departure a single photographic plate and an institutional decision, made early and never revisited, to say nothing whatsoever about its subject.

What follows across seven rooms is not a biography. It is not a portrait in the conventional sense, and it is emphatically not an introduction. It is, at best, a meticulous inventory of the room she happened to be sitting in — conducted at a level of detail the subject herself was never offered.

Visitors arriving in expectation of information are asked to surrender that expectation at the cloakroom, where it will be held safely and not returned. Her occupation, her opinions, her address, her taste in music, the events of the preceding afternoon, and her position on the present exhibition all fall outside the scope of this presentation. The bottles, by contrast, have been catalogued in full.

What the institution is prepared to confirm is this: she is seated. She is looking to the left of the frame, at something the exhibition was unable to acquire. The light is afternoon light and behaves accordingly. Everything beyond that is, in the considered view of the curator, the visitor's problem.

Die Kuratorin · n. n.
The Curator, name unknown